My journey toward liberation began by tracing the migration of Sufi music – sound as memory, sound as freedom. I was drawn to this music as a living archive, a force that transcends borders, in which time dissolves and community becomes the only compass. Initially, I focused on mapping fixed routes – lines connecting the Cape to Asia and back to Africa, charting the Indian Ocean as a pathway of return. I believed that by reconstructing these historical routes, we could reunite what colonialism had severed.

But after five years of deep listening and traveling to be with many Sufi groups across Asia and Africa, I began to hear differently. I realized that this music isn’t tethered to linear time. Perhaps I had been listening from the wrong perspective all along. What if this sound – this act of liberation – comes not from the past, but from the future? What if this is a future technology, calling us forward rather than backward?

We place immense weight on the past to free us, asking our ancestors to carry us, never allowing them to rest. But what if the very technologies that guided them were not of the past, but of what is yet to come?

This shift redefined everything for me. In a world that often defies reason, we must allow ourselves to think radically, even irrationally. True liberation demands that we reimagine our relationship to the sacred – to what survives and outlasts violence and oppression. For me, this is the essence of sonic liberation.

The word “dhikr” means “remembrance.” My film asks: What are we being called to remember? In its repetition and resonance lies not only memory, but a future waiting to be heard. I imagine the story of dhikr as a liberation technology sent from the future.

Our children are the true custodians of time. They are not waiting for us to catch up; they are already watching us from what lies ahead. In them, we already exist, and they carry the memory of what we will become.

Our children have seen this world. They know its fractures, its violence, its beauty, and its ghosts. Because they have already moved through it, they send us what we need to survive it: remembrance.

This, I believe, is dhikr.

It is not only a chant or repetition. It is a frequency that unlocks. A rhythm that dismantles fear. A vibration that reminds us who we are when we strip away everything imposed on us.

I am trying to imagine what dhikr looks like. Does it look like our children – whom we haven’t met yet – guiding us back into being?

Dhikr is not history. It is prophecy. It is not a return. It is an arrival. It does not ask us to make sense – it asks us to feel. To surrender to a rhythm that comes from beyond linear time. I am reminding myself that liberation is not something we inherit. It is something we are called to remember. And in remembering, we become free.